The Crunk Feminist Collective » Feminismhttp://www.crunkfeministcollective.com
Where Crunk Meets Conscious and Feminism Meets CoolWed, 15 Jul 2015 15:01:26 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1New Series: Dalit History Month – We Are Because He Washttp://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2015/04/21/new-series-dalit-history-month-we-are-because-he-was/
http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2015/04/21/new-series-dalit-history-month-we-are-because-he-was/#commentsTue, 21 Apr 2015 15:14:51 +0000eeshaphttp://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/?p=7104Read more »]]>We at the CFC believe that our work crosses issues and borders. We believe that transnational feminist solidarity is a key element of feminist praxis for those of us who live in the US. We have much to learn from and share with feminist thinker and organizers from around the world. Over the month of April, to commemorate the first ever Dalit History Month, we will be sharing with you a series of posts to raise awareness about the history and organizing done by the Dalit community, in India and abroad. In coming weeks we will be sharing Dalit feminist voices here at the CFC. We hope that through this collaboration with the Crunk Feminist Collective and Dalit feminists from Dalit Women’s Voices in collaboration with Dalit History Month and the Dalit Women’s Self-Respect Movement we will spark more conversation about caste in India, and the consequences of the Indian caste system.

Today’s post is about Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, a Dalit scholar and statesman. While many of us know the names of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar’s name is often omitted from the story of India’s Independence Movement. He was a radical voice against the caste system, and today’s post here at the CFC will explain his significance to Dalit activists and the fight against caste injustice.

Guest post by: Sanghapali Aruna Lohitakshi

For almost twenty years I remember celebrating just one day every year.

It wasn’t my birthday,

It wasn’t Diwali,

It wasn’t Christmas,

It wasn’t even New Year.

For us that day was in fact like all of those holidays and even more. We would wait anxiously till its arrival. And when the day came it would bring us new clothes, and my mother would cook payasam, a sweet porridge, and we would go out to meet friends, relatives and attend programs.

It was special because we celebrated the immense power of our freedom, dignity, and self-respect.

This day is April 14th, and we call it Ambedkar Jayanti, which commemorates the birth anniversary of one of our most powerful freedom fighters. His name is Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and he was a Dalit scholar, jurist, philosopher, feminist, anthropologist historian, orator, writer, and economist, And while he is a founding father of India who drafted the Indian constitution, to Dalits like myself he is so much more intimate a figure. He is our Babasaheb, a name that denotes our affection for him as our political father.

Babasaheb is an ideal. A role model who despite the violence of caste apartheid did not take up arms to bring justice to the people. His weapon instead was education. To know oneself as a Dalit in a system that says you are beneath worth is arduous. For you have to build all the models you need to believe in your own dignity even as every institution around you says you have none. His pursuit of self-knowledge and its companion challenge to the caste institutions around him deeply inspire us to also do the same. And as he communicated his journey as a thinker, activist, and later as Buddhist, his pen became his weapon to change the lives of millions of Dalits.

Despite his significance, Babasaheb rarely figures in any of the academic discourse about Modern India. This omission is not accidental. It is because a Dalit Founding Father of India is too subversive an idea in caste apartheid India. Because if he is taught we must teach also about the system that attempted to block his and all of our communities progress. And the lies that prop up the other casteist founding fathers of India will be brought to light. His intersectionality confronts the homogenization of caste apartheid.

Ambedkar then is an anchor in Dalit History. For we can associate all of the powerful leaders and movements that converged in the opportunity of his leadership and all the movements and leaders that have been transformed after his intervention in the destiny of our nation.

It is in this spirit that on Ambedkar Jayanti I want to share with the Crunk Feminist family some short excerpts of Dalit women who talk about why Dalit History is significant.

“I feel the creation of the Indian constitution is one of the significant events in the Dalit history. It is the first legal document that has criminalized caste discrimination and untouchability .It is a matter of pride then to be part of that Dalit milestone for it is a reminder that Dalit history is a history of assertion. It is a revolution for equality and justice.” - Ashwini, Doctoral Fellow at JNU, New Delhi

“In the age of colonization of knowledge, if we, as Dalits, don’t write our own history, it will be distorted or erased by others. When I started writing this, I could place all my family stories in a context, How my grandmother was inspired to be the first educated woman in the whole village. How my grandfather loved Ambedkar and taught himself to read just so he could read his works.”

Our people have to rise up then in action to write away the disgusting appropriation. In the advent of Buddhism, and the fierce and merciless way in which Brahminism sought to suppress it in the subcontinent, we have over centuries a testament to the fact that an egalitarian parallel spiritual space existed for Dalits that dreamed of a better world. And this space mobilized our people and gave us dignity and in doing so threatened the Savarna hegemony.” – Dr. Vee Karunakaran Dalit History Month Collective, Boston

“Indian school curriculum only focuses teaching about Gandhi, Nehru, queen Laxmibai, hindu gods and festivals. It is difficult to associate with the history classes that focused solely on the history of the oppressors written by the oppressors for the oppressors, especially when you know that you are the oppressed.”- Sanghapali Aruna, Doctoral Fellow at JNU, New Delhi

“What has been really powerful for me in this re-writing of Dalit history is the discovery of so many strong role models of Dalit women and men that I could aspire to become. Coming across the heinous crimes and atrocities committed against Dalits in this country for so many decades now, was also a very painful experience. But what was also very transforming was the realisation that the history we as Dalits have is not just one of victimhood and survival, but of relentless resistance and unshakeable resilience.” – Christina Dhanaraj, Dalit History Month Collective, Bangalore

“The systematic elision of the experiences of the marginalised through selective listening and selective deafness has left an impact of silencing of our voices and that of our elders, especially in conversations with the mainstream. We never had any space to celebrate our own success within ourselves and so “furthermore, the richness and uniqueness of our lives and their contributions to the lived realities of this world would be lost if we do not record them.

We need to tell our stories, write our histories and herstories, and leave footprints on the sands of time.”-Cynthia Stephen, an activist, independent writer and researcher

I invite all of you then to continue with us on our journey of self-knowing and self-determination. And in doing so remind everyone of the subversive power of dignity. As we say in our movement, Jai bhim. Jai Bhim meaning we salute you in the footsteps of our beloved Babasaheb and move forward in our caravan for freedom.

When I heard a documentary called Dark Girls had been produced in 2011 to share the often silenced stories and experiences of dark-skinned women and girls, I felt a wave of emotions and had a range of reactions fluctuating from curiosity and anxiety, to excitement and anticipation. I wrote an ode to dark (skinned) girls and kept re-watching the promotional video connecting each time to a story of trauma by remembering my own color(ism) complex issues, and feelings of insecurity, rejection, and pain because of my skin color. I imagined that the documentary would open up old wounds but heal them in the same sitting by hearing truths, shared out loud, and in community. I would know for sure that feeling like a “black sheep” in my family was not an isolated experience and that perhaps women in my generation and after, who had themselves experienced the “dark side” of colorism were fashioning new narratives for themselves and their daughters (instead of passing on/down the same tired ass colorist preferences that left us feeling broken and unpretty). I was hopeful that Dark Girls would give dark-skinned blackgirls a starting point to move past the generations-long silence(s) about colorism in the black community and the ongoing and harmful effects of community cultivated self-hate. Unfortunately, the documentary didn’t live up to my fantasy. When I finally had the opportunity to watch it in its entirety last summer when it aired on OWN, I was disappointed, confused and (at times) bored as hell and disinterested. The evocative narratives of dark skinned women that drew me in to the teaser clips were broken up by would-be history lessons about slavery, commentaries about beauty, and men who reiterated the romantic rejection several of the women expressed by claiming their penchant for #teamlightskin . The failures of Dark Girls far outweighed its possibilities and it felt like an important moment was missed. Instead of being a space for healing and moving forward there was further stigmatization of dark-skinned-ness nestled between victim shaming, pathology, and an over-simplification of the genesis of colorism. Further, while dark-skinned women were given space to bear witness to their stories, they were not allowed to analyze them. Black men were presented as the experts of black womanhood, while white men showed up to chastise black men (for not desiring darker skinned hues) and fetishize black skin.

When I heard that there was a sequel to Dark Girls I was all in my feelings again but for different reasons. This time I don’t have expectations, I have concerns. I am definitely here for light skinned women having the opportunity to tell their stories and talk about their experiences of colorism, but I fear that their narratives will be compared, contrasted and set against the dark girl narratives in a public and combative competition of “que es mas oppressed?”

Conversations about colorism are important, complicated, messy and difficult. The discussions oftentimes feel like we are participating in a fight that unknown, sometimes unseen instigators set up because we feel defensive if/when we believe our lived experiences are being dismissed, and we are reactive to triggers of our personal pain. No one wants to be made to feel like their “suffering” isn’t or wasn’t sufficient, and it is exhausting to participate in Oppression Olympics. We walk away feeling frustrated because most of the time the conversations are one-sided because one person’s testimony leads to another person’s silence, guilt, anger, or frustration. Then we feel resentment towards each other all over again for perceived privileges and/or slights. We talk over each other if we talk at all and can’t help but judge each other’s stories and compare them to our own. Then we end up re-telling the same stories to other black women with skin like ours assuming only she “gets it.”

If Light Girls goes wrong it will perpetuate an unnecessary division between dark skinned and light skinned women situated in blaming each other instead of understanding each other. If it goes wrong, the testimonies will read as a blackened version of white saviorism, marking light skinned women as race martyrs who frame their color discrimination as the fault of their so-called nemesis, dark (skinned) girls (who, in the first film, were faulted for their own issues).

If Light Girls goes right it will be an extension of earlier conversations that do the work of interrogating the built-in privileges of being light skinned alongside the costs and consequences. If it goes right it will offer counter-narratives that don’t compete but rather join together in critique of the larger systems of inequality that cause colorism in the first place, namely white supremacy and THE patriarchy. If it goes right it will acknowledge that racism and heterosexism are, for all intents and purposes, color/ism-blind. According to those blanket oppressions if you ain’t white, you ain’t right, regardless of how much cream is in your coffee. A colorism conversation that does it right would need to include both (dark and light) perspectives at the same time, in conversation (and at times fruitful debate) with one another, showing compassion and empathy for our shared experience of “shame” and feeling “too black” or “not black enough.” The conversation would also be inclusive, not of black men stating their preference of romantic or sex partner, but of black and brown women whose skin color is a shade in-between, and whose stories oftentimes gets lost in translation (and conversation).

My concern is that the sequel will perpetuate the ongoing war of words (and pain) between light skinned and dark skinned women, attempting to determine who has it worse. Admittedly, as a dark-skinned blackgirl who grew up with a light-skinned sister and high yellah best friends, I sometimes feel hard pressed to sympathize with the struggles (that from the outside looking in always looked like benefits) of light-skinned-ness. Don’t get me wrong, I know that colorism exists (and is fueled in the black community), and that the essentialist assumptions about light skin (read as good/privileged/pretty) creates and therefore competes with essentialist assumptions about dark skin (read as bad/disadvantaged/unattractive), but I also don’t know any light skinned chick truly trying to be dark (keep in mind, being darker when you are already light skinned is not being dark skinned, it is being a darker shade of light—there is a difference). And as I reflect on that admission I have to deal with its implications, rooted in my childhood desire to be light(er) and deep seated resentments I felt when it seemed my peers took their light skinned-ed-ness for granted (or punished me for not being ‘light like them’).

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the documentary if only to see if they get right what went terribly wrong in the first film. I hope they make space for the narratives of light-skinned women who love the skin they’re in, instead of focusing exclusively on those who wish their skin was a darker hue (celebration of one’s complexion was missing from the first film). I am also hoping, like Yaba Blay, that we “hear more from men about their own experiences with colorism, not just their opinions about women’s experiences.” I want to hear the stories that are seeped in black masculinity, gender and sexuality, the stories black men bury in the so-called pathologies of black womanhood, and the stories that cause black men to wrestle with their own complexion-coded insecurities that they oftentimes take out on black women or encourage black women to take out on themselves (or each other).

One thing is for sure, though. Come Monday night there should be some interesting conversations, critiques, and stories shared, and whether that happens in the film or in reaction to it, I’ll be listening.

]]>http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2015/01/15/colorism-complexes/feed/5Embracing “Crazy” in the “Land of the Free”http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2014/12/23/embracing-crazy-in-the-land-of-the-free/
http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2014/12/23/embracing-crazy-in-the-land-of-the-free/#commentsTue, 23 Dec 2014 15:21:29 +0000crunkadelichttp://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/?p=6991Read more »]]>

Guest post by Jillian Ford

Folks have called me crazy much of my life. For the first two decades, “crazy” was a term of endearment: a way to signal my individuality and creativity. In my 20’s, “creativity” slid into “eccentricity.” Now in my third decade, “eccentricity” has morphed into “just plain ol’” crazy, or that “not-so-cute” kind of crazy, or the “go take your meds” type of crazy. After years of trying to convince others I’m “normal,” I am changing course to embrace my crazy. Because who, after all, is assigning that label to me? Who, more generally, gets to call who crazy? What does it say about those pointing fingers? About their positionality, their power, and their apparent ability to remain “sane” in the midst of such unrelenting state violence?

Grappling with Franz Fanon’s psychosocial theories (that mental illness emerges in colonial contexts) has allowed me to step out of the torments and paralysis of depression. Western psychiatry rests in part on the understanding that mental illness is individual and chemically-inherent. The possibility that mental illness could result from the conditions in an oppressive state allows me to surface from isolation. In asserting my craziness, I am learning again the power that accompanies reclaiming words meant to shame. This renders powerless those people and forces that seek to extinguish my light.

I became a high school social studies teacher because I was appalled by my public school curriculum as an adolescent. I enrolled in graduate school because I became sick when I realized the extent to which the curricular lies were systemically entrenched. In addition to the Grand Narrative of American Progress central to social studies curriculum and the glaring omission of countless histories, I continued to resist the embedded insistence that “America” was “the land of the free.”

It was impossible for me to honor my freedom-seeking journey through civic participation; a truth contrary to every message in school-based civic education. In fact, my journey toward mental wellness could not commence without deliberately untwisting the promise of freedom and public sphere action. Once I did this, I was able to see that replacing “freedom” with “justice” might make more sense. Perhaps I am better able to fight for justice within the state instead of freedom granted by the state. This country was not created with my freedom in mind, and telling Black kids that they can find freedom through its systems can set them up for spirit-breaking craziness. Fanon’s influence led me to investigate my wellness as relates to actions of the state. This is what I found.

There is a particular way my skin crawls when people try to engage me in a conversation about the minutiae of what “actually” happened when George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin or when Darren Wilson murdered Mike Brown or when Daniel Pantaleo murdered Eric Garner or when the Beavercreek police murdered John Crawford or when the Los Angeles police murdered Ezell Ford or when the San Bernardino police murdered Dante Parker or when the Saginaw police riddled Milton Hall with over 40 bullets. Or when – the week before the grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson – the Cleveland police murdered Tamir Rice. Rice was 12 years old. He was playing on a playground when cops gunned him down.

I use the term “my skin crawls” because I am not aware of language to more effectively convey the sensation. Physiologically, the origin of my crawling-skin condition is deep inside my heart. I see images of my heart riddled by bullets, with cartoon-like blood gushing out of the holes. It happens in an instant. As though the blood from my heart is oil, my legs and arms ignite instantly when the small flame that usually keeps me steady bursts into a blaze upon contact. It happens in an instant. It is the flames under my skin that make it crawl. It feels awful: hot and cold and tight and lose and angry and sad and disgusted and afraid.

I know from what some others tell me that my internal chaos manifests just as chaotically on the outside. Those are the folks who call me crazy. But it is hard explain my bullet-riddled heart and the oil-like blood and the flame turned inferno in an instant. Being called crazy used to rub salt in my heart’s bullet hole wounds. As such, I silenced myself for a long time.

On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson murdered 18-year-old Michael Brown. The St. Louis police saw to it that his body lay in the street for four and a half hours. The ensuing script was too predictable. A day or two after the murder, the White-controlled local government and the White-controlled police department and the White-controlled media commenced their all-too-familiar character assassination of the youth that had just been assassinated for real. They said he stole some cigarillos and choked somebody out. Somebody said the tape was fake, and somebody else said it wasn’t just one cigarillo but a whole box. As and attempt to evade skin-crawl, I avoided media and conversations that delved into those details. Because how I really feel about that is who. the. fuck. cares. Folks engaged in those discussions can keep those respectability politics to themselves. Mike Brown is now a young person who is no longer alive. His life mattered.

But Wilson saw the monster that has been living in The White Imagination since Europeans first invaded Black and Brown peoples’ spaces in the 1490s. The monster is big and angry (“…[Mike] said, ‘what the fuck are you gonna do about it?’” – Darren Wilson, in ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos. 11.26.2014.), beastly and menacing (“…he slammed the door shut on me”), monkey-like and uncontrollable (“…[I] was like a five year old, holding on to Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big this man was.”). Most of all, the monster is sub-human. The monster’s life does not matter.

Through public school curriculum, the legal system, news media, and numerous other sources, agents of the state are trained to believe that Black lives don’t matter. That is the most concise way to explain why a Black person is killed every 28-hours in the United States by a cop, a fake-ass cop, or a vigilante. That is the only way to comprehend why the St. Louis police would come out to a set of peaceful protesters in full riot gear. That is the singular way to fathom why we were promised 40 acres but got instead 40 shots; why we were promised a mule but instead are treated as mules. Zora Neale Hurston already told us black women are the mules of the earth. Echo.

I’m ready to say “don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lorde split ya” to the month of October. Is it me or was this past month just extra ridiculous? From the ongoing shenanigans in Ferguson, to the exploits of so-called white allies in the anti-street harassment movement, to the tomfoolery of Thug Kitchen (I knew they had to be white hipsters), to the yearly ritual of blackface that is Halloween–there has been a range of indignities big and small thrown at people of color that boggle the mind.

But wait, you say, that’s every month.

Right. You are absolutely right. (Sigh).

Even though I…you…we should be inured to this foolishness, some days it feels like the wounds are broken open anew and that this shit is too much to take. And for those moments I need the healing words of women I admire—the mentors and friends in my head—that help me move through the world with dignity and not just collapse under the weight of all the hatred and violence. Here are some of my favorites in my mental arsenal.

When micro and macroagressions try to reduce my humanity on the daily, I remember the words of indigenous-rights activist Rigoberta Menchú:

“We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism.”

When I recognize the root of the fear directed at me as I move through the world, I remember the words of memoirist and trans advocate, Janet Mock:

“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

When I’m feeling low about my work I remember the words of labor activist, Dolores Huerta:

“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.”

When I’m feeling like taking care of myself has no room on my agenda—a constant struggle—I remember the words of our Lorde:

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

When I’m meditating on the difficult work of moving through the world in love, I think of civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs’ words:

“Love isn’t about what we did yesterday; it’s about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.”

When I feel like my voice is too small, too unimportant to be shared or heard, I remember the words of my personal guru, Toni Morrison:

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

And when I am making a way out of no way, I remember the words of my favorite poet, Lucille Clifton:

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I mistakenly thought that environmentalism was something simply to do with saving the rainforest and the ozone layer. “Environment” was a fancy word for places far away from the working class former factory town where I lived. Certainly, “saving the environment” was important for all of us, but it was hard to think about forests and the ozone while living next to a crack house and being battered by Reaganomics. I did not learn until I was much older and formally learning about Black feminism in a classroom that environmental justice was inextricably linked to issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and access.

The effects of climate change and the do-nothing attitude of governmental leaders is creating a recipe for epic disaster as you read this post. These days it is hard for me not to notice how connected so much of the violence we experience in communities of color as an issue of environmental justice.

Take, for instance, Detroit.

Detroit is a city that can’t seem to catch a break. Between the extreme government-sponsored fiscal mismanagement to the don’t-give-a-fuck attitude the city has towards its residents, Detroit is generally not seen as a place that has its shit together. Nevertheless, the current fabricated water crisis is the coup de grace of fuckery in a city already under resourced.

“Mass water cutoffs have been accelerating in Detroit. The Water Department has hired special contractors, under the direction of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, as part of restructuring the city in the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. Up to 3,000 families a week are being denied water for failure to pay their water bills. These bills are often only $125 dollars behind.

Many victims of the shutoffs are already in an agreed-upon payment plan schedule. It is believed that the aim is to make the Water Department more attractive as an investment for privatization.”

Oh wait, we’re talking about low-income Black and Brown folk, not humans? ‘Cause that’s clearly the message that is being sent here.

Before someone bends their mouth to talk about personal responsibility and the like, I want to be clear that lack of access to water is not only a reprehensible moral issue, it is an impending public health crisis. Water is not just for drinking, although that is, of course, vitally important. We need water to cook with, to bathe with, to flush our ding dang toilets. When thousand of residents in a city are without water, this circumstance could turn into an even bigger, and potentially more deadly, health problem.

The conspiracy theorist in me just thinks that the powers that be just want poor folks to die and if they can’t have a natural disaster (see Katrina et. al.) then one can be made up. Then we can have gentrification, displacement, and the destruction of another chocolate city.

Yesterday, it was your birthday. Happy birthday, dear! I’ve been missing you a lot and thinking about you a lot lately, especially since there’s a newly discovered crop of your short stories. I feel like that was a gift for all of us.

Your work has continually been a gift to me and, though you have transitioned to being an ancestor, I want share my appreciation for you life and your work.

I’ve been a fan of science fiction and fantasy since I could read. Reading about lords and ladies, outer space, and other fantastical things were crucial to my development growing up. It gave a girl from hood license to think, dream, and build beyond what I could see in front of me. But by the time I became a teenager, I was wondering, “where are the Black people”? in all the stories I devoured. I started reading more Malcolm X than Robert Jordan or Anne McCaffrey and my love affair with speculative fiction waned.

One fateful trip to the library (this was a very lucky trip, because I also discovered Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accentsthat day), I ambled into the sci-fi section and was stopped dead in my tracks. There was a book with a Black woman on it. I’d never seen a science fiction book with a Black woman on it. The book was called Parable of the Sower and it changed my life completely. I had already started scribbling my own little sci-fi stories, but reading this brilliant book that was well written, fascinating, terrifying, and thrilling inspired me to really think of myself as a writer. Thank you.

A few years ago, I was reading your essay “Positive Obsession” and the following quote really stood out to me. You wrote:

What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, going, thinking – whoever ‘everyone’ happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people?

Thank you for explaining my lifelong love. Thank you for writing works that transform hearts, minds, and worlds. Thank you for providing a possibility model for Black feminist brilliance.

Sometime between now and July 4th, the Supreme Court is set to rule on two cases that will affect our access to birth control, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius. In both these cases for-profit companies are using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to challenge the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) guarantee that health insurance plans include coverage of contraceptives.

But some employers, like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood are claiming that some forms of contraception are abortion, and that they blur the lines between abortion and contraception. How many times do we have to say that medical science (not to mention common sense) proves that abortion and contraception are two different things. Birth control is not, in fact, abortion. Both birth control and abortion should be available and accessible to anyone who needs them, but they are not the same thing. Should we pull out our 7th grade biology books yet again to explain how bodies work and where babies come from?

Abortion access and contraceptive coverage are connected but distinct. It’s crucial to know that abortion access has been, and continues to be, treated separately from all other health care – to the detriment of all low-income people, Native communities, military communities, federal employees and anyone who relies on federal funds for their health care. The Hyde Amendment is a legislative provision that bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, with exceptions for incest and rape. The Helms Amendment states that, “No foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” USAID has interpreted this amendment to prohibit U.S. funding of abortions that would preserve the physical or mental health of a woman, yet allow it for victims of rape or incest, or to save a woman’s life. However, the U.S. has never funded any programs that include abortion services, even in these legally permitted cases.

These abortion funding restrictions are deeply problematic. A low-income person struggling to make ends meet needs to be able to make important, personal decisions based on what is best for her circumstances, not based on her income. And now corporations are trying to apply these same types of harmful coverage restrictions to contraceptives.

As we have seen in recent months, these federal restrictions are not where the fight for abortion access ends, with clinics closing all over the country as a result of targeted anti-choice state legislation. Abortion access is a crucial element of reproductive health care, as is access to birth control. These Supreme Court’s decisions, while centered on contraception, are important to the broader fight for reproductive justice.

Ninety-nine percent of women will use contraception at some point in our lives, whether for family planning or other medical reasons like treating endometriosis. Birth control should be treated like any other preventive medical care. Here’s why:

Number one, a boss should not be able to affect, limit, restrict or interfere with their employees’ sex life or health care – it’s coercive and unjust.

Number two, if corporations are granted that power, it could set a dangerous precedent and yet again allow corporations more rights than human beings. Singling out health care like contraception sets the stage for our bodies to be divided at the mercy of politics – once again leaving those people who can afford out-of-pocket costs with their rights in tact, and actively excluding those who are poor – women of color, young women, LGBTIQ folks and anyone who finds themselves without the money it takes to get the health care that they deserve.

And finally, number three – these cases are a contortion of the argument for religious liberty. If your boss doesn’t believe in the use of birth control, that’s his call. But a boss can’t ignore the law and impose his personal religious values on his employees. If the Supreme Court decides to give Hobby Lobby executives the right to decide what kind of health care their employees get, it may open the door to so many others who are trying to use religion to disregard anti-discrimination measures.

These cases are about contraception. If the Supreme Court rules that bosses may impose their religious beliefs on their employees we’re looking at scary scene. Such a ruling could pave the way for religious objections to treatment for HIV/AIDS, blood transfusions, vaccines, etc. It’s important that we all know what’s at stake – potentially leaving the most vulnerable people in our society at the mercy of a corporation’s religious views.

Earlier this week, TMZ released the now infamous elevator video of Solange going HAM on Jay Z. The responses have been swift and the memes have been hilarious. I’m a let y’all finish but, there are a few things missing from the conversation.

First of all, Solange was dead wrong. Now don’t get me wrong, I am a huge Solange fan. She’s my favorite little sister in the history of celebrity little sisters. I’ve always appreciated her spunk and her fighter spirit. Real talk, I always liked that there was a possibility that she might haul off and slap somebody. Hell, I might haul off and slap somebody, so I appreciated that connection. However as a feminist, the fact that she actually did haul off and slap somebody, namely Jay Z, is not okay. I, like most feminist, am against relational violence in all its forms and if we are to take a serious stance against relational violence, we have to be more diligent about finding it in unexpected places and amongst unusual suspects. Now I get that this doesn’t look the way that relational violence normally looks so it may be harder to identify it. But, the truth of the matter is that sometimes women are violent. Violence isn’t always a man hitting a woman or even a man hitting another man. Relational violence isn’t always with someone who you are in an intimate relationship with. It can take many forms. Brothers and sisters fight, mothers and daughters fight, cousins fight and in this case in-laws were fighting (well Solange was). The point is, this is a moment of relational violence and we have to see it as such.

We also need to be really careful about our reactions to this video. When I saw the video my initial response was “yo, what the hell is going on?” The very next thing I said was, “what did Jay do to make Solange wild out like that?!” and that is where I was wrong. Wondering what was going on in the situation is a normal response for any nosey ass person like myself. Wondering what Jay did to elicit such a response is where I was not being a very good feminist. That is nothing less than victim blaming and I know better than that. Nothing Jay did justifies her putting her hands on him. She is responsible for how she reacts to every situation. There were a myriad of possibilities available to her. She chose to act violently and that is not ok.

The second point I want to make is that Jay Z actually exemplifies what a man defending himself from the attacks of a woman can look like. After Chris Brown assaulted Rihanna, many men came to his defense and justified his attack by saying, “if she comes at me like a man, I’m a beat her down like man.” This language works to equate physical attacks on men to attacks on masculinity and therefore, evokes a hypermasculine response to such attacks. Now, we know that masculinity is fragile as hell but, I do think this actually does a disservice to men by making them seem like flat, uncomplicated beings who have to respond in such demeaning ways. What Jay Z showed is that it actually doesn’t take all that for a man to stop a woman from attacking him. He too had a myriad of choices available to him. He chose to block his body, grab her foot and put it down, and push her back from his personal space. Let me be clear is saying that this was not an example of him turning the other cheek. What it is an example of is someone who did not feel the need to defend his masculinity in a way that pulled him into participation.

My third and final point is about the Queen Bey. Now y’all can say what y’all want about her seeming lack of participation in the fight, but what I saw Beyonce doing was exemplifying some of the core tenets of black feminism 101—self-care and self-definition. First, let me say that Beyonce’s response felt very familiar to me. As a child, my older brother and I would throw down fighting while mother calmly read the newspaper, painted her nails, did her makeup, etc. When we would come rolling by her she would quietly move her feet out of the way and continue to mind her damn business. Now, we did get reprimanded after we finished the fight, but she gave no fucks during throw down. And you know why? Because, breaking up other people’s shit is fucking exhausting! Not breaking up other people’s shit is self-care! Additionally, the conversation about where her loyalties lie is nothing more than our desires to define Beyonce. But let me remind us that black feminism demands that we allow people to be self-definitional. That means that Beyonce gets to not choose sides and that’s ok. Beyonce gets to define herself, define her boundaries, and define when and where she enters. Y’all can say that smile she was rocking when she got off the elevator was her trying to look perfect all the time, but that looks like a self-care/self-defining smile to me!

So, I’m not going to suggest that you stop participating in the hoopla. Hell, I’m about to search some gossip sites as soon as I finish this post. I’m just asking that we don’t throw away our feminism while we do so. Happy hunting!

For your #TurnUp Tuesday pleasure, I thought I’d do a little Crunk theorizing today. As y’all already know, CRUNK is a generative term, a percussive term that centrally points to the kind of energy generated by putting disparate elements together like hip hop and feminism or black nationalism and feminism or crunk and feminism.

The kind of sonic expressiveness that encapsulates crunkness is heavily reliant on a percussion driven sound. So as we aimed to put the terms crunk and feminism together, we were interested in how the expressive culture of crunk could animate our feminism.

CRUNK Feminism puts the bass in your voice and the boom in your system. Our feminism makes you say it with your chest!!! It is a feminism that makes you move, a feminism that indexes a fundamental relationship to one’s body and one’s embodiment.

Crunk Feminism is feminism all the way turnt up! Feminism that is off the charts. Feminism that is lived out loud. Feminism that demands to be heard.

And it is that moment of (the) turn up, that signal achievement of being all the way turned up – crunk – that inspires this revisiting of what percussive feminism means and makes room for.

So first, a genealogy by way of a playlist.

In 1994 – 20 years ago, I know! – Lil Jon released a Southern regional classic called “Who You Wit? Get Crunk!”

Though the innanets claim never to forget, there seems to be very little trace of this song until Lil Jon released it on an album in 1996. But I distinctly remember it more than two years earlier. So for this little exercise, consider my memory an archive of CRUNK. Suffice it to say, Crunkness is at least 20 years old, and prolly a little older, especially if you peep Andre’s line “I gots it CRUNK, if it ain’t real, ain’t right” on the late 1993 release of Player’s Ball.

1994 also saw the release of Notorious BIG’s first album Ready to Die, Da Brat’s Funkdafied, TLC’s Crazy, Sexy, Cool and the first major inroads of Hip Hop in the academy with the release of Tricia Rose’s groundbreaking academic study Black Noise.

But I digress.

Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz refined that signature CRUNK southern sound and made it famous in the early 2000s with tracks like

To understand CRUNK is to understand how Hip Hop, in this case Southern Hip Hop, conjugates language in such a way that Black people’s relationship to it is less a corrupting and more an interpellation – or calling forth of language, the kind of language that allows us to call forth ourselves as (who) we are . Or rather as who we be.

Despite urban legends about CRUNK as portmanteau of Crazy and Drunk, in its most basic iteration it refers to infusing energy into a system so that it speaks the loudest, can be undeniably heard, and makes its most significant impact.

Get some CRUNK in ya system!!!

Crunk is both the past tense and the past participle of to crank. The onomatopoeic, hydraulic CRUNK calls forth that distinct sound of cranking up an old Monte Carlo like the one my mama had, or an old Cutlass. It’s the tale-tell UNHHHHHK… that infuses energy into the system.

To crank something is either to turn it on or to turn it up. And in the case of the turn up, the imperative to “crank it” means to turn it up so loud that you might bust your speakers. To turn it up so loud that it cain’t go no mo’. By way of a corollary –and perhaps a crunk-induced coronary– One can’t get CRUNK if one won’t turn up.

The turn up is a moment endemic to CRUNK. It cannot be understood outside of either the ontology or the technology of CRUNK.

One envisions a knob being turned –cranked—to its highest levels. The image is striking most notably because very few of us even have the kinds of radios that run with knobs anymore. To turn up the volume on things no longer requires us to crank a knob. Rather we touch an image of a button on a flat screen, run our fingers across a scroll wheel, or slide a knob upward. This kind of past-in-present understanding of crunkness, this tethering of the turn up to an image of a technological world rapidly receding, is similar as Crunkadelic says, to our clicking on an image of a floppy disk to save documents in WORD even though no one uses floppy disks anymore.

This using of our tense linguistic past to conjure both a present and future state of being tells us something about the incapacity and insufficiency of language to fully apprehend either the ontology or existence of Brown people. But it also points us to the genius of the African-descended. Such truths point us to the beat, that singular entity that allows us to smoothly and simultaneously occupy –and indeed become masters of– both space and time.

This is the ontological world of CRUNK, the world constituted through (the) turn up. When a car has been crunk, it is on, ready to go. When the music has been crunk, we are on and ready to go. There is no in-between state. The car is either uncrunk or crunk. So too with the turn up. Either things are all the way turnt up or they are not.

Crunk means to be all the way turnt up. It means to have turned up.

Turn up is both a moment and a call, both a verb and a noun. It is both anticipatory and complete. It is thricely incantation, invitation, and inculcation. To Live. To Move. To Have –as in to possess– one’s being. The turn up is process, posture, and performance — as in when 2Chainz says “I walk in, then I turn up” or Soulja Boy says, “Hop up in the morning, turn my swag on.” Yet it holds within it the potential for authenticity beyond the merely performative. It points to an alternative register of expression, that turns out up to be the most authentic register, because it is who we be, when we are being for ourselves and for us, and not for nobody else, especially them.

Lil Jon’s question “turn down for what,” then, becomes an existential question of the highest order.

To be black or to be non-white in the West is to live in a world that expects us to live in a state of being turned down, unobtrusive, inconspicuous, ornamental. We are to both turn down and tone down. Our presence is loud even when we are completely silent.

We should not believe the lie that turning down, that perpetual incognegro status, will reduce the severity of white supremacy’s impact on our lives. It’s reach remains uncurtailed, its view unobstructed. And

Your silence will not protect you. This is a truth we know. A truth Mama Audre left here with us. A truth that carries us again to the fundamental existential question Turn Down for What?